


as rivers in a dry place

by fragilelittleteacup



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Love at First Sight, M/M, Mythology References, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religion, Romance, Scars, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 23:33:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17032029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilelittleteacup/pseuds/fragilelittleteacup
Summary: Geordie knew he was saved from the moment he saw the boy.





	as rivers in a dry place

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. This isn't beta read, as per usual.

Geordie knew he was saved from the moment he saw the boy.

And that was honestly the only word that could apply to Sidney Chambers, because the strain and weight of manhood had not yet claimed him, hadn’t laid its heavy hands upon his smooth skin. Geordie felt tired, felt the hard slog of life grating him into someone bitter and jaded, and couldn’t help but compare himself to Sidney. A young soul with wild curly hair, badly in need of a cut, a charming smile, and a cherubic face to rival the angels that soared in stained glass windows.

Geordie didn’t go to church much. At all, if he was being honest. But the precarious balance he’d been maintaining, the tightrope between adultery and the wholesome ideal of a perfect family, has finally come asunder. The bed in his office was hard and unfriendly, cold when he awoke of a morning, and alcohol was less of an enjoyment than it was a clutch. His mouth, thick with the musty residue of whiskey, his stomach churning nauseatingly with the pull of poison. Retching at the hopelessness of it all. Only in his darkest moments, and with a considerable amount of exasperation, did he turn his face to the heavens and seek absolution.

It was nighttime.

He sat in a pew, hat held in shaking hands, throat tight with prayers he couldn’t bring himself to voice. He remembered, in the war, a night just like this one. A church, half destroyed by bombs, scents of flesh and wood mixing in the air, his eyesight gone blurry from a blow to the head. The stone beneath his temple had been cold, and sounds were far away. A statue, by the altar, with hands folded against her breast. Mary, perhaps, her skin godlike and smooth, eyes closed. He hadn’t known. Life was like a dream, back then, and he almost believed he’d never emerged from that place. He’d needed help for a long time now, but had never known how to ask for it. You didn’t ask for it. Nobody did. His father certainly hadn’t, and somewhere deep inside he had resigned himself to follow in the drunkard’s footsteps. A shallow grave with a cracked headstone. A weary wife and children that flinched too easily.

Everything seemed so final.

He slept in the church that night. In all that time he spoke not one word to God, couldn’t make the pleas leave his mouth. He wondered how he’d ended up here, how he’d become this person. A dent in his forehead from the edge of his watch, hands folded beneath his face, sun rising through the windows and blinding him with its intensity. Discomfort in all parts of life. How is that men could serve their country, be thrown into the depths of Hell, and be left husks of themselves? How could he ever have moved on? He’d seen men and women killed, soldiers firing blindly at crowds of civilians, maniacal in their murder. At least he’d never taken pleasure in it. At least he’d known he was damned. At least he’d killed the bad men, the evil men, the ones who were kidnapping their own people and strapping bombs to their stomachs.

That was what he told himself.

That was what he had to believe.

He emerged from Grantchester’s dusty church, blinking into the dawn. The wax candles were melted down to their stubs, fires extinguished, the scents of holy devotion clinging to his crumpled clothes. He patted down his pockets, found no cigarettes. A goal for the day, then. Nicotine to satisfy what would never heal.

Geordie turned his tired eyes outward, across the lovingly maintained church garden. A boy lounged beside a hyacinth plant, young face inclined towards the sun, lips parted. His blue irises were bright and clear, like the church windows that had dazed Geordie so brilliantly. They held no imperfections, no shadows of a difficult life, and shone with an agelessness that Geordie couldn’t comprehend. His eyelashes were long like a girl’s would be, like Cathy’s had been once.

Then Geordie’s gaze moved downward, followed the slope of the boy’s bare back, and he realised that perhaps he’d misjudged the young man’s age. He had stripped down to a pair of pants, shirt discarded carelessly on dewy grass, the wings of his shoulder blades tight as he leaned back on spread palms. Shrapnel scars, familiar as breathing to Geordie, had been carved into the meat of his back, a story cruelly etched into skin. Geordie swallowed hard, the snap and blast of explosives making him wince.

The boy reached up to brush a curl of hair from his face, and Geordie’s whole world bent around his shape, curved to fit the angle of his hand, wrapped itself about this moment.

How could the war have ever left such beauty in its wake?

As if hearing him, the man glanced over his shoulder, face turned coyly to the side. He smiled, face creasing with the genuine cheer of his expression, and Geordie swallowed hard. A flush of embarrassment crept up his face, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. The boy stood, straightening up to his full height, brushing down his thighs. He picked up his shirt, and Geordie tried not to notice the blemishes that bruised his ribs, the scars that told a story he knew too well.

“You were asleep,” the angelic stranger informed him, supple lips tilting into the smallest, most tender of smiles, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

Geordie cleared his throat, finding it difficult to speak. “Well, I… Thank you.”

He got a nod in return, and was somehow moved to believe that this young man knew exactly why he’d been hiding in a place of worship, understood precisely the struggles of veterans in a peaceful village that had never seen the horrors of war. He dressed, pulling his shirt down efficiently.

“My name’s Sidney. I sing with the choir sometimes.”

“Geordie. I’m… I’m a policeman.”

Sidney plucked a purple flower from the plant near him, twirled the fragile petals between elegant fingers. Geordie thought of Apollo and the brother of Cynortus, the blasphemous tales of religion he’d found overseas, far richer and more nuanced than what he’d been taught in bible classes. When Sidney ducked his head, a wave of hair touching the angle of his brow, Geordie wondered if he’d been transported into a tale of Greek romance. Bodies arching on an Etruscan oinochoe, two men; a young immortal with unshorn locks and eyes steadfastly kept to the ground, mouths meeting in a symphony of sensation.

Sidney handed him the flower, and Geordie took it, apparently utterly divorced from the sarcasm and cynicism he usually employed whenever tender gestures were directed at him. Did it really take complete destruction to reunite him with freedom? Is this all it took? Had he needed to break his life apart, brick by brick, to meet this choir boy?

Sidney met his eyes, and there was an empathy there that Geordie could never have expected.

“Come again, if you like,” Sidney told him, voice tender and gentle, “You needn’t suffer alone.”

Nobody had ever pinned him down, had ever seen the deepest parts of him so astutely, and Geordie couldn’t decide whether he wanted to embrace this person, or push him away so violently, as to ensure this truth would never escape again. But Sidney Chambers smiled so beautifully, offered such unconditional promise, that he couldn’t bear to do a thing so heinous.

So he just stood there.

When Sidney walked away, his footfalls were nearly silent.

 

 


End file.
